The Best Poundcake You'll Ever Eat: Stock's Bakery, Philadelphia, PA

The cake so good you'll eat it even if no one's having a birthday
Photo Credit: TH

Cake is kinda like sex or pizza. Even when it's bad, it's good. A lot of people settle for the Duncan-Hines boxed cake, and that's fine on a budget or in a pinch. Whether it's quick and easy or made by overblown Italian pseudocelebrities from Jersey City and covered in nigh-inedible fondant, cake almost never feels like an everyday dessert. It's for special occasions, because it's so moist and decadent. There's a reason why they put Marie Antoinette's neck on the guillotine for her tone deaf dismissal of the poor in France saying "let them eat" it. There's a reason why cake is almost always the food of choice when a filmmaker or television director wants to show a depressed woman trying to cheer herself up. It's reserved for birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. Bad cake is still mostly sweet and moist if flawed. Good cake though? Much in the same way that good or great pizza or sex leaves an impression, the best cake always leaves you wanting more even if you've eaten it all, or more pointedly, even if you've eaten too much of it and can't fit a single morsel more into your belly.

The best poundcake, or really cake in general, I've ever had didn't come from a wedding bakery or someone who was featured on a Food Network baking show, but from a small rowhome-turned-bakery in the lower Northeast of Philadelphia. Whether you call it Kensington, Fishtown, or Port Richmond is irrelevant. The little shop, which has been open for almost 40 years, produces some of the most sought-after cake in the area. What is the secret to that poundcake? For as much as baking is the science to savory cooking's engineering, it's both rude to ask a baker for their recipes if you don't know them, and also, the chemistry of baking isn't necessarily exact exact. I'll be willing to bet that a lot of butter is involved. Butter makes everything better. But anyway...

No matter how they do it, the end result is perfect. The cake is paradoxically dense and decadent, but also fluffy and light once you bite into it and it almost melts in your mouth. The hot trend is that desserts shouldn't be too sweet, and by itself, the poundcake has just the right level of sweet. Personally speaking, I grew up eating a lot of fruit snacks and other smack-you-in-the-face sugary treats, so too sweet doesn't bother me. If you do want more sweetness, you can get the sugar on top in the form of icing. You can get the cakes round and frosted for birthdays or in "bars" that can come topped with frosting either vanilla or chocolate. Personally, "no frosting" as an option is good enough for me, even if I do enjoy the extra sweetness. The cake is that good.

If you don't believe me, just ask anyone in Philly who knows. That area of the city has a few gems, like Tacconelli's Pizza, but pizza has an intraregional rivalry dividing anyone from forming a consensus. Stock's feels like a sure thing. A lot of other Philly-area bakeries specialize in other things, mostly of an Italian persuasion. Stock's is located in a neighborhood where Polish, German, and Irish immigrants settled heavily alongside Italians, so it follows that it would have something that the South Philly Italian bakeries might not have, and it's that thing, the poundcake, that sets it apart from everyone else. If you do something different and do it excellently, people will take notice. While most will recommend places dealing in savory dishes to folks visiting Philly, Stock's and their poundcake is every bit as essential to the Philadelphia culinary experience. I've been eating it for too long and enjoying it every time for me not to recommend it with the highest marks. You don't even need for it to be a special occasion to do so.

What: Stock's Bakery
Where: 2614 E. Lehigh Avenue, Philadelphia, PA
Website (Facebook)
Price: Family Night Out (not that kinda place, but that's where the prices per cake are)
TH Recommends: Poundcake, chocolate icing if you get any